Friday, July 22, 2011

The Goldbach Conjecture and literal UFO reports

Witness testimony, whether about UFO sightings, crimes, accidents, et cetera, is an iffy thing. And witness testimony after a period of time has passed even more so.

But that aside, I take accounts of events -- historical, mythological, reportorial, Biblical – as a “true” rendering of what witnesses saw or experienced, expressed with caveats about “inflation,” misinterpretation, subjective extrapolation, and mental bias.

Thus, the Biblical account of Ezekiel, for instance, is not a fanciful metaphor to make moral a moral point not is it a confluence of fictional elements imagined for whatever reason by the Biblical writer whose rubric is Ezekiel. It is a representational rendering of what the witness experienced and set down, as best as he could, considering the limited parameters of existence at the time.

Roswell’s wirnesses, at the time of the alleged incident – 1947 -- can be accounted as veracious. (Witnesses, providing testimony, many years later, suffer the vicissitudes on metal acuity that afflicts people as they age and as time passes, so their accounts can be ignored -- should be ignored.)

But to get at the heart of the UFO enigma, UFO researchers may take a serious perusal of witness accounts and testimony, past and present, providing exquisite details and data that has, so far, been sublimated, replaced by the more sensational aspects of what witnesses experienced.

Every UFO report, including those of “hoaxers” such as Adamski or Fry, should be evaluated, vetted, for elements that abut other testimonies, from reliable, credible sources.

The UFO-like reports, from religious and mythical writings – the Bible, the Hindu texts, the Greek myths, the Norse sagas, and all the rest – should be immersed in scrutiny and examined systematically rather than literarily.

And the Goldbach Conjecture?

Goldbach's Conjecture is that any even number may be expressed as the sum of two primes. If this conjecture is false, then there must be at least one even number that cannot be expressed as two primes.

Just as Goldbach’s theorems and musings about integers remains unresolved, the pursuit of verification provides a methodology for study of UFOs, past, present, and future – if UFO mavens are serious about explaining the UFO phenomenon.